Arts and Humanities | Open Access Articles | Digital Commons Network™

Seamus Heaney’s poetry is rich in detail about agricultural and food practices in his native Northern Ireland from the 1950s onwards, such as cattle-trading, butter-churning, eel-fishing, blackberry-picking or home-baking. Often studied from an ecocritical perspective, the abundance of agricultural and culinary scenes in Heaney’s work makes a gastrocritical focus on food and foodways suitable. Food has been recognized as a highly condensed social fact, and writers have long tapped into its multi-layered meanings to illuminate socio-cultural circumstances, making literature a valuable ethnographic source. A gastrocritical reading of Heaney’s work from 1966 to 2010, drawing on Rozin’s Structure of Cuisine, shows …

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Commensality And Connection: How Shared Food Experiences Connect Characters In Philip Pullmans His Dark Materials, The Book Of Dust And ‘Lyra’ Stories, Susan Anna Grace May 2020

Commensality And Connection: How Shared Food Experiences Connect Characters In Philip Pullmans His Dark Materials, The Book Of Dust And ‘Lyra’ Stories, Susan Anna Grace

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Commensality is an inherently social activity that shapes society and enacts social dynamics. Consequently, these shared exchanges can reveal much about the society and the individuals who engage in the act. This thesis explores commensality in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, The Book of Dust Series and companion texts to the novels. The research investigates how commensal exchanges create and maintain connections between characters across the collection. In doing so, it considers how literary characters differ from real-life humans and how the existing body of knowledge on commensality can be applied to literary figures. A qualitative approach was …

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‘Some Foods Are Considered Aphrodisiac Because They Resemble Sexual Organs’: On Isabel Allende’S Aphrodite, Anke Klitzing Feb 2019

‘Some Foods Are Considered Aphrodisiac Because They Resemble Sexual Organs’: On Isabel Allende’S Aphrodite, Anke Klitzing

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At the age of 56, well into her second marriage and a grandmother herself, novelist Isabel Allende decided to find out whether aphrodisiacs are all they are made out to be. She wrote Aphrodite: The Love of Food and Food of Love after extensive research into erotic literature across some centuries and continents, and this foundation of age-old wisdom also means that the book, while published in 1998, remains a timeless source of inspiration and enjoyment.

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When Literature Scholars Write For General Readers: A Two Person, First Person Essay, Sue Norton, Laurence W. Mazzeno Prof. Feb 2019

When Literature Scholars Write For General Readers: A Two Person, First Person Essay, Sue Norton, Laurence W. Mazzeno Prof.

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This dually authored first-person essay offers a narrative account of the far-ranging writing experiences of two well-established academics who, like many others working in higher education, contribute writing to mainstream publications as well as to scholarly ones. The essay considers the implications for professional and personal reputations when material targeted at one kind of audience is easily accessible by another through internet ‘context collapse.’ It argues for an inextricable connection between authorial ethics and the essential rigour of all good writing, and it encourages scholar-writers to invest their energies in nonscholarly writing for its value to society.

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Pineapple Poetry - Studying Literature Through A Food Studies Lens, Anke Klitzing Dec 2018

Pineapple Poetry - Studying Literature Through A Food Studies Lens, Anke Klitzing

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In his essay 'A Winter Feast', literature professor Paul Schmidt unveils the layers of meaning that Pushkin wove into the description of a New Year’s feast in Eugene Onegin. But unusually, Schmidt continues his essay making the jump from literary criticism to food studies by musing on the various items on the menu without reference to Onegin, but rather to the cultural and philosophical context of food, bringing in such varied references as Brillat-Savarin and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Studying food writing through the lens of literary criticism allows us to penetrate the social and symbolic meanings of food more deeply, while …

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John Mcgahern : Priceless Insights Into His Art, Eamon Maher Feb 2018

John Mcgahern : Priceless Insights Into His Art, Eamon Maher

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John McGahern has been the subject of a number of monographs in recent years, but this is the first essay collection dedicated to his work since the three volumes of NUI Galway’s The John McGahern Yearbook, edited by John Kenny, and the critical essays assembled by Mullen, Bargroff and Mullen in a Peter Lang publication from 2013.

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Mary O’Donnell’S 1992 Debut Retains Its Awesome Word Power 25 Years On The Light Makers Was A Compelling, Beautifully Written Tale Of Relationship Breakdown, Eamon Maher Aug 2017

Mary O’Donnell’S 1992 Debut Retains Its Awesome Word Power 25 Years On The Light Makers Was A Compelling, Beautifully Written Tale Of Relationship Breakdown, Eamon Maher

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In 1992, I remember reading Mary O’Donnell’s debut novel, The Light Makers, with a mixture of awe and excitement: awe that a novel could be this well-written, excitement at what I perceived to be the advent of a significant new voice in Irish fiction. Two other novels followed in the 1990s – Virgin and the Boy (1996) and The Elysium Testament (1999) – that failed to capture the public imagination in the same way. They are both good novels, but they are not nearly as compelling as The Light Makers. We had to wait 15 more years for …

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Catholic Sensibility In The Early Fiction Of Edna O'Brien, Eamon Maher Oct 2014

Catholic Sensibility In The Early Fiction Of Edna O'Brien, Eamon Maher

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No abstract provided.

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From Galway To Soho, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire Mar 2012

From Galway To Soho, Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

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This is a food related recitation / poem / ballad that was learned from my father and now back in the oral tradition thanks to a my recital of it at the special food poetry and song evening at the 2012 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.

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Seeking Redemption Through Art: The Example Of Colum Mccann, Eamon Maher Feb 2012

Seeking Redemption Through Art: The Example Of Colum Mccann, Eamon Maher

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Colum McCann is rightly acknowledged as being one of Ireland’s most talented living novelists. The success of his most recent novel, Let the Great World Spin (2009), which won the National Book Award in America in 2009 and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2011, really cemented his reputation as a writer of substance. He is also one of the new generation of Irish novelists who possess few discernibly ‘Irish’ traits, their preoccupations being of a more global nature.

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Blaming It On The Church : On Frank Mccourt's ''Angela's Ashes'', Eamon Maher Jun 2007